Most systems for processing the sale of products are seller-driven, whereby the seller prices, packages, configures and offers the product for sale, and the buyer decides whether or not to accept the seller's offer. In a buyer-driven system, however, the buyer dictates the terms of the offer and one or more sellers decide whether or not to accept the offer. A “help wanted” advertisement, for example, is a buyer-driven inquiry since the employer is looking to locate and buy the services of a qualified employee. The inquiry is advertised to a large number of potential employees, who may respond by submitting their resumes to the prospective employer.
Priceline.com, Incorporated of Stamford, Conn. is a merchant that has successfully implemented a buyer-driven system for the sale of products such as airline tickets and automobiles. Priceline.com utilizes a Conditional Purchase Offer (CPO) Management System, described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,794,207 and International Application Number PCT/US97/15492, that processes Conditional Purchase Offers and/or Binding Conditional Purchase Offers (Binding CPO's) received from individual consumers. These CPO's contain one or more buyer-defined conditions for the purchase of goods or services, at a buyer-defined price. The Binding CPO's are typically guaranteed by a general-purpose account, such as a debit or credit account, and thereby provide sellers with a mechanism for enforcing any agreement that may be reached with the consumer. The CPO's are provided by the CPO management system to sellers, either directly or using seller-supplied rules, for individual sellers to either accept or reject. If a seller accepts a Binding CPO, the CPO management system binds the buyer on behalf of the accepting seller, to form a legally binding contract.
Thus, the CPO management system empowers individual consumers to obtain goods and services at a price set by the consumer. The CPO management system provides numerous commercial advantages to sellers as well. For example, the CPO management system permits individual sellers to effectively sell excess capacity when actual demand fails to meet forecasted demand. In particular, the CPO management system provides an effective mechanism for sellers to be confident that if they accept a consumer's offer, the consumer will purchase the requested goods or services at the agreed-upon price, and not just use the information to ascertain the seller's underlying level of price flexibility, which, if known to a seller's competitors or customers, could impact the seller's overall revenue structure.
For some sellers, and the airline industry in particular, response to an individual CPO is difficult without significant re-engineering of the existing transaction processing system. As a result, these sellers empower an agent to manage buyer-driven commerce transactions. These sellers become agency-based sellers, with a CPO management system acting as their agent. However, with multiple agency-based sellers, there is no method for the CPO management system to allocate CPO's among the agency-based sellers.
It is also possible that an agency-based seller can satisfy a CPO with more than one seller-defined CPO rule. There currently exists no method for the CPO management system to select the seller-defined CPO rule generating the maximum revenue for the agency-based seller.
For broadcast-based sellers, some form of allocation is also desirable. This is particularly helpful where allocation based on the order of seller response is not possible or appropriate. For example if two broadcast-based sellers respond at the same time, there must be some method for allocating the CPO among them. Similarly, for broad-cast based sellers it may be appropriate to allocate or limit the CPO to particular sellers based on region of business, market area, service history or other factors.